Computer Science

When students walk across the stage at this weekend’s commencement ceremonies at the University of California, Merced, they will join the nearly 4,000 scholars who have earned degrees from the university, while marking yet another campus milestone as the campus’s 10th graduating class.

Innovate to Grow, the annual showcase of UC Merced student creativity, features some amazing teamwork this year, from medical and agricultural devices to mobile applications for saving energy and water.

First hosted at UC Merced in 2011, the CITRIS Mobile App Challenge is a semester-long competition that blends education, prototyping skills and teamwork to empower students to develop apps for societal benefit.

The challenge is expanding this year to include teams at UC Davis and UC Berkeley.

Winning teams at each school receive up to $1,000 and several have developed their apps further by raising additional funding, creating research initiatives, entering incubators or starting companies.

A group of students in the most recent School of Engineering capstone design course at the University of California, Merced, devised a sweet solution to a local farm’s harvesting problem – one that is reaping long-term benefits for the farm and the students.

Professor Florin Rusu’s passion for analyzing voluminous amounts of data has won him a prestigious early-career award from the federal Department of Energy, making him the fifth of the nine eligible faculty members in the computer science and engineering group to earn the honor, and the first one to get this award from the DoE.

Southern California Edison has been selected as this year’s recipient of the UC Merced School of Engineering Vanguard Margin of Excellence Award.

“Southern California Energy’s partnership with UC Merced has created countless opportunities for engineering students to positively impact their communities,” School of Engineering Dean Dan Hirleman wrote to the company, calling it a model partner for the university.

The Vanguard Award was created to honor corporate partners that have had a transformational effect on the educational experience of School of Engineering students.